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There can be no better pairing than the great American poet Emily Dickinson recreated through the magical imagination of Irish writer Nuala O’Connor. In her novel Miss Emily, O’Connor tells the story of fictional eighteen-year-old Irish maid Ada Concannon, who takes a position in the Dickinson family household in Amherst, Mass.

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It’s sheer delight to read of the growing bond between two women of different ages, classes and education who complement each other so perfectly. Through their friendship, Ada finds support for the challenges of an Irishwoman in nineteenth-century New England and the eccentric Emily faces her fears of the world beyond her garden.

Miss Emily is mesmerizing from its first pages, a feat made possible only by the pen of a writer of immense talent who connects with Dickinson. She writes from the poet’s perspective with utter confidence, without cliché and with the same love of words.

“My lexicon bulges,” O’Connor writes in Emily’s voice. She says she likes “curt words: death, bird, pearl, bee, stone, crown, stab. These to me are the words that sing and dance and that deserve their place in a poem as surely as a nightingale deserves a place in the world.”

A book about a poet with a clear-eyed view of existence must be more than a cheery tale of overcoming adversity. Death is ever present in her poetry and these lines are hers: “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”

Ada wonders “if we are all doomed to imprisonment one way or another.” But she decides there is always hope, which seems to be O’Connor’s own interpretation of Dickinson’s body of work.

She has won many fiction awards in Europe (most often for short stories) and, in her native Ireland, writes under the name Nuala Ni Chonchuir. Senior Penguin editor Adrienne Kerr writes that she is “thrilled” to introduce O’Connor to Canadian readers.

A gift indeed.

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A Secret Music

Susan Doherty Hannaford

Cormorant Books, 288 pages, $21.95

Secrets inhabit the affluent Nolan home in 1937 Montreal as surely as the notes from protege Lawrence’s piano. When Susan Doherty Hannaford’s A Secret Music begins, middle-child Lawrence, 15, is fighting to keep those secrets from spilling out. He agonizes, for example, when a dog roots out evidence of his brother John’s illness on bloody napkins and carries it out to the street.

He takes responsibility for John’s sunken cheeks and shrinking form sand his mother Christine’s emotional and mental illness as if he created them. She once had a brilliant musical future before her so-called “flattened anxiety” made it hard to get out of bed. His businessman father, with his fine clothes and tubes of Brylcreem, deals with the problems by being absent.

When she can, his mother encourages Lawrence’s talent, as does his piano teacher Miss Tarasova and Wilfrid Pelletier, the real-life founder of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. He dreams of becoming a concert pianist but lives with constant dread about leaving his mother and frail brother behind.

Doherty Hannaford draws on her family’s history in her hometown and her novel is full of the exuberance — and the sorrows — of the Montreal Irish. The ghosts of Irish immigrants who died after arriving on the famine boats of the nineteenth century haunt the city and she pays them homage.

A quibble: the book can be irritating with the overuse of street names and directions. At times it can feel like a travel guide.

A Secret Music is a powerful debut infused with melodies from Bach to Boogie Woogie and promise for her next book, a biography of an Ottawa woman’s battle with schizophrenia.

Linda Diebel is a journalist and non-fiction author.

This story has been corrected from a previous version which said John had tuberculosis.

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